Today, there are no ships in western U.S. ports.
Seattle: empty.
Long Beach: empty.
The arteries that once carried the lifeblood of global commerce — consumer goods, food, machinery — have stopped pulsing. And they aren’t coming back anytime soon.

Trump’s tariffs on China, even if reversed tomorrow, would be too late to undo the damage. Tariffs aren’t just a tax — they’re a fire alarm that tells companies: Find new partners, leave America behind. And they have. Supply chains don’t turn on a dime. They’re delicate, sprawling networks built over decades — and once broken, they don’t repair overnight.

We are now ten to fifteen days out from seeing the first tangible consequences:

• Store shelves that are half-stocked… then empty.
• Critical shortages not just of “luxuries” but of essentials: medicines, electronics, basic foods, household goods.
• Rising prices and panicked consumers.
• A second, more brutal version of the pandemic’s toilet paper frenzy — but this time, it’s not just paper products. It’s everything.

This is a siege.

History gives us a grim preview of what happens under siege.
During World War II, Germany placed Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) under siege for nearly 900 days. Supplies were cut off. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation. Diaries from the time describe citizens boiling wallpaper for the paste, eating sawdust bread, trading jewelry for a rotten potato.

Even in Anne Frank’s diary — in a hidden annex behind a bookshelf — the slow, crushing starvation of a besieged people creeps into the story. She famously wrote about eating nothing but turnips for weeks, dreaming of bread and butter, longing for fruit.

Siege isn’t just about hunger. It’s psychological warfare. It’s the slow erosion of a society’s will to survive, to trust, to dream.

Donald Trump has effectively inflicted a siege on his own country.
The most powerful nation on earth — choked from within by a policy so myopic, so self-destructive, that it weaponizes scarcity against its own people.

No enemy could have done this to us so quickly, so cleanly.
It took a self-proclaimed patriot.
It took Trump.

—P.

Phil Italiano

Publisher, Visionary, Provocateur

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